The use of AI images without critique communicates to people that these things are normal and fine and inevitable and non-harmful. This isn’t about staging a ‘consumer boycott’ in terms of harming profits as much as it’s about not normalizing this kind of stuff culturally. The less acceptable this stuff is, the more likely people will be willing to push back against big tech more generally. It’s part of the same movement.

And it’s additive, not zero-sum. No one is saying “don’t bother unionizing” because they’re too busy pushing back on the use of AI images in an online community. In fact, I’d reckon, the broad societal pushback makes it more likely that people will be inspired to unionize!

post with a score of 181 currently … kinda difficult to argue that someone asking a question as politely as possible, and getting a lot of agreement that the question is worth asking, is simply trolling.

“It’s not AI, also even if it is (and honestly why are you looking at something critically for more than 3 seconds to even determine this, you should just let the slop wash over you in perpetuity and never think about it) then it is good actually and the people criticizing it are just cranks”

Can you provide a few real-life examples of images made with a model trained on just “a few thousand images on consumer hardware”, along with stats on how many images, where those images were from, and the computing hardware & power expended (including in the making of the training program)? Because I flat out do not believe that one of those was capable of producing the banner image in question.

Three problems with this:

1. If computation means “anything that happens in the universe” then the term ‘computation’ is redundant and meaningless.
2. We do not know or understand all of the physical laws of the universe, or if those laws indeed hold universally.
3. Our consciousness does not operate at the level of atomic physics; see Daniel Dennett’s ‘compatibilism’ defense of free will vs Robert Sapolsky’s determinism. If we’re vulgar materialists, then it follows that there is no free will, and thus no reason to advocate for societal change.

Matter being the primary mover does not mean that ideas and ideals don’t have consequences. What is the reason we want the redistribution of material wealth? To simply make evenly sized piles of things? No, it’s because we understand something about the human experience and human dignity. Why would Marx write down his thoughts, if not to try to change the world?

These systems are premised on the idea that human thought and creativity are matters of calculation. This is a deeply anti-human notion.

https://aeon.co/essays/can-computers-think-no-they-cant-actually-do-anything

The banner could be anything or nothing at all, and as long as it isn’t AI generated, I would like it better

The Luddites weren’t simply “attacking machinery” though, they were attacking the specific machinery owned by specific people exploiting them and changing those production relations.

And due to the scale of these projects and the amount of existing work they require in their construction, there are no non-exploitative GenAI systems

By systems positing human creativity as a computational exercise

A couple more spots:

The one at the back in the middle with the arrow pointing above its head also has hands emerging directly from its torso

The one at the back squished in between the two signs is missing an ear

Iris/pupil size 2nd from the right are wildly asymmetrical

Also the whole thing looks like shit

curious how quickly Carney would act if BRICS threatened to sanction him personally (and permanently)

Yes! This is almost exactly my technique. I try to do the naming in a steady rhythm, around one per second, picturing the thing in my mind while mentally saying the word.

My hypothesis is that it syncs up both sides of my brain at a timing that is in the delta wave frequency, same as a deep sleep state

Thanks - and yeah I have a feeling I’ll end up doing exactly that. Tailscale is definitely overkill for this!